Zach Hugo

Zach Hugo co-founded a Georgia roofing company that did three and a half million dollars its first year and twenty five million in its sixth.

He came on the SALTYmf GOAT Podcast to talk about building a business, and he and Brad had never met before they sat down. Brad had nearly worn a t-shirt to the taping with Hugo's mugshot printed on the front, sent over by Hugo's business partner Kenneth, and passed only because he did not yet know the story behind it. By the end of the episode he was asking for one.

The company started in 2017 out of necessity and started properly in February 2018. Hugo sells, and he says plainly that he is bad at production, bad at process, bad at managing anyone including himself, and that the whole thing works because his partner is the implementation king with a meeting and a note for everything. What he built instead was the pay structure. Crews, sales staff and office are paid every Friday, every commission is transparent enough that a rep can add up his own numbers, and they have never missed a payroll for their people, though he and his partner have missed their own. Roofing is a savage market with ten thousand companies in Georgia, and every owner in it thinks the next good salesman is the easy fix, so Hugo hears about offers made to his top guys around ten times a year. Half a company, a fifty thousand dollar bonus, a new truck. They stay.

Last April he went to a 10 and under girls rec league soccer championship against a rival club, which he coached, and his daughter got pushed down for about the eighth time with no whistle. He came unglued at the field supervisor. They chirped at each other the whole seventy yard walk to the parking lot, and when the man got in his face Hugo put a hand on his chest to push some space between them. He was arrested for it. He had never been arrested before, never been in a real fight, describes himself as risk averse in every other part of his life. He got twelve weeks of anger management and pre-trial diversion, and he is banned from coaching. His daughter watched the whole thing happen. He called the rec department the next morning to apologize, and he says the supervisor had not done anything and was just the guy in charge.

The company's annual retreat that year was in Punta Cana. Thirty five people flew down, and Hugo walked into the first group dinner in black jeans and a white shirt to find every single one of them wearing a t-shirt with his mugshot on it. Everyone had been worried he would be upset. He thought it was incredible. Strangers at the resort kept coming up to ask what he was in for. His own father coached him until eighth grade, and once drove up to Kentucky and stayed two weeks in a hotel just to watch summer football practice, which Hugo did not understand at all until he had kids of his own.